> G'day All; > > I'm in the process of buying a new PC and I'm thinking of going with an > AMD64, but it's been about 6 years since my last hardware purchase :-) > so a bit of friendly advice is most welcome. This is what I'm thinking > of getting... > > AMD64 3.0Ghz CPU > Epox 8KDA3J Motherboard > Liteon DVD+-RW SOHW 1653S02C > 120G Western Digital SATA HD (might get two and go RAID but I probably > don't need it) > nVidia GeForce FX5500 >
Uh, you forgot - really decent power supply. If you're thinking of re-using your old case and power supply, forget about the power supply. It really needs to be solid. > I know the video card is dated but I'm not gamer and mostly happy with > the nVidia TNT2 I have at the moment, so I don't see the need for > anything better (unless there any horrible compatibilty issues with it) > I'd suggest looking for a 5200 with a passive heat sink, 128 MB memory or so. > Any advice or comments extremely welcome. > Ahh...opening yourself up to the bias' of others. Ok. So forget the 754 pin socket. You'll get a nice performance boost, 8% to 10% by going with a 939 pin socket, plus some future proofing, not that that's going to help a lot. The pain for this is the cpu will be around US$16 more and you have to by DIMMs in pairs, thus - 2 512 MB DDR3200 DIMMs (current US price for Mushkin High Performance Level II 222 matched pair is $242). Also, you might be served a bit better with something like the Shuttle SN95G5. It has the same chipset as the Epox motherboard - nForce3, but includes a suitable power supply and is almost dead silent using a Gfx card with no fan on it. Otherwise the Gfx fan is the annoying sound you'll hear. Though the Pioneer DVD drive I use tends to make a mighty whoosing sound while ripping audio CDs. And you might want to surf - http://www.silentpcreview.com/ if noise is any type of factor in your consideration. Bob -- - -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
